


in reminiscence

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Teen Sherlock, victor trevor and mummy of my own making
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-20
Updated: 2015-05-20
Packaged: 2018-03-31 10:53:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3975382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A wistful yearning of the past is all they have in the end. They become whispers in the wind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in reminiscence

"Some invitations you don't refuse, Sherlock", Mycroft is saying from within the car.

He is an indistinct shape, slimmer than Sherlock has ever seen him against the water-sprayed car window. Sherlock has four exit points at his disposal.

It is ultimately Mycroft’s desperation that traps him.

“Sherlock, get in the car”, he’s says, leaning to hold the door open. “Please.”

Struck with the surprising urgency, Sherlock hesitates, rain skidding down his spine. He’s drenched to the bone and he forgets where he meant to go before Mycroft skid neatly to the curb and caught Sherlock in the mist of the headlights, glassy light pooling on the street.

This is a novelty: Mycroft’s vague silhouette, his pale fingers and smooth, round nails, the watery glow plucking the red of his hair, his new imploring manner. Sherlock hasn’t seen him in eight months.

He gets in the car, noting a strange pinch in his stomach.

The door clicks decisively and it’s done. Mycroft’s pulling them away. Immediately the crashing of the rain is distant and Sherlock, now encapsulated in the leather heavy warmth, regrets it.

He should have run anywhere; he could bear to be anywhere at all, other than in this bright and shiny car with Mycroft; Mycroft, who has inexplicably found him, with that inexplicable note of desperation, who is now driving at an inexplicably calm clip.

The car meets the road so smoothly that Sherlock, who has become accustomed to the jerking and jostling of harried taxis, hardly notices the movement. Besides the faint rush, the humming engine and the squeak of the windscreen wipers, it is unflaggingly quiet and Sherlock keeps his eyes on the assemblage of little crystal bottles on the dash, sloshing and illuminated. Mycroft’s blackberry lights up and chirps, dies unanswered, and starts up again.

“Won’t you get that?”

“No.”

His shirt is stuck to his back, jeans heavy on his thighs, and he’s is uncomfortable, dripping into the pristine seats. He's keenly aware of Mycroft, crisp and clean and blank as a piece of fresh stationary, his eyes on the empty roads.

Sherlock hasn't showered in about a fortnight; being on the run, but sitting next to his brother makes him feel especially dirty. The last thing he ate was a purloined breadstick from a bakery and maybe that was sometime this week. He doesn't notice hunger pains anymore, but there is a pain in his bones that persists and he’s gathered paranoia around him like dust.

“Where are you taking me?” He asks.

Mycroft doesn't pick up on his suspicion, it’s as though he doesn't notice it. “Pall Mall”, he says, simply, and Sherlock watches his profile, dappled in shadows and tight. He’s wearing a new immaculate suit, and like the car, it is suggestive of something lofty, something like ascension in the ranks.

Typical Mycroft.

“What are you doing these days?” 

“Just a civil servant.”

“But what? Foreign office? Culture, media, and sport?”

Mycroft casts him a vulpine look, nose longer than ever. “I hold a minor position in the home office.”

“May I have a card?”

“Why not?” Mycroft watches him fiddle with the glove box. Cigars, lighter, mint. No papers of any sort.

“Hard to do my job when my brother keeps consorting with criminals,” he says.

“Oh, did you have some small wars scheduled? Am I inconveniencing you?”

“Obviously you are.”

“I resent that. I don’t need you to pick me up –”

“Judging by your obsession with the rear view mirror, I most certainly do.”

“Like a child after school, Mycroft, _no_ , I was doing fine without you.”

“You’re thin as a rail, you haven’t eaten in days, washed in a week, maybe two, and you last slept on somebody’s front stairs like a derelict cat and you’re just as twitchy. It’s distasteful.”

They’re talking over each other, and then there’s a long, absurd silence. Sherlock rubs at the grime and stubble on the side of his jaw.

“It’s that little box of a bakery, isn’t it, that you’re stealing from?”

“You’ve stopped smoking. Why?”

“Your lover. Where is he?”

“I left him behind."

"You’ve been in Amsterdam.” Mycroft says this with some note of triumph; Sherlock grits his teeth.

“Have I really? How can you tell?”

“Your jeans, for one. You smell like fish and old water.”

“Took a dip in the Thames.”

Mycroft passes an assessing eye over him, the familiarity of which drives a frisson through Sherlock, and for the rest of the trip, Mycroft says nothing. Sherlock snaps the glove compartment, open and shut, stares out at London going from dirty to impeccable. The rain thins as Mycroft rolls them through high gates and up a driveway, Sherlock step into the cold, sharp wind and finds the face of a nondescript house in the dark.

“What day is it?” He asks confusedly, but Mycroft’s taken the car with him.

To his side there is a tree, rising tall and slim like a ghost. Sherlock stumbles sideways to lean against it and breathe. The sky is dirty with stains of clouds.

Maybe it’s the sudden air, high and rarefied after the twice breathed air of the car, or maybe it’s the icy drizzle on his cheek – something has triggered a spin and Sherlock sways dizzily under the bitter freshness of the leaves wetly brushing his temple. There’s an inchoate song in his head, just some strange, cut off notes. He doesn’t realize he’s humming until Mycroft materializes to take his elbow.

“Come on”, he says, like to a child. “Come, now. Let’s get you clean.”

Sherlock allows himself to be led. “Led like a lamb to the slaughterhouse”, he says, and Mycroft clucks his tongue. 

There was a tree, tall and fat in the country, a wide mushroom of glossy leaves against the sky, where Sherlock once discovered startling cerulean eggs deposited carefully in a frayed tangle of nest.

He coveted the tree with its little orange chested Robin cocking its head at him, until he found Mycroft one afternoon, sprawled with a plate of sandwiches and a book, posed to needle his little brother. He’d taken over the tree and the shade.

“Veni, vidi, vici”, Mycroft said lazily, and Sherlock said, “Veni, vidi, _vomiti”_ , and stole one of the sandwiches to give to the dog.

But this is Mycroft’s custom, this conquering. His brother's taken over the government, maybe even the world. This is what he does – insidiously slide into an unassuming stranger’s life and seize control from within, coup d’état, and Sherlock was the first victim, simply because he was closest.

“Don’t be melodramatic”, Mycroft says.

The porch lights are on, sulfur yellow, and Sherlock sways at the door until Mycroft prods him inside.

He drips on the foyer until the dizziness passes.

 

Mycroft’s bathroom is a large and clinically clean space of white and blue.Sherlock gives it a cursory inspection with little interest, noting the bottles of Valium and Aspirin and what could be diet pills, the collection of Mycroft’s personal accouterments, (Mycroft is groomed to exactitude). All boring.

He moves to the mirror, and with some shock regards the shadow under his eyes like fresh bruises, his sunken cheeks, more angles and hollows than ever, and the snarl of wet hair going past his chin.

Grimacing, he tries with his fingers to untangle an especially matted section, but it’s so crusty and tangled with dirt that he, fishing a blade out of one of the drawers, saws it off with difficulty and tosses it in the wastebasket, just as Mycroft walks in with a stack of folded material.

“ _Jesus,_ ” he intones, and Sherlock catches his exasperation in the mirror. “A barber is in order, I suppose.”

“Not _your_   barber, I hope”, Sherlock says. Mycroft’s hair is, has always been, cajoled into unnatural neatness.

They both consider Sherlock in the mirror. He looks frightful, haggard and dirt streaked and thoroughly discolored, with a chunk of missing hair. Mycroft assumes a resigned air, and waves at a rack. “Towel, clothes. Find a toothbrush, shave if you like. Come to eat when you’re done with…this.”

It is more of a relief, more so than the warm water or the thick grime sliding into the drain, to peel away from the soggy clothes. He lets the stream hit his shoulders, chin to his chest, to ease the tension, passing the soap that smells fresh like grapefruit over his arms. Shampoo in his eyes, he scrubs hard at his teeth to rid his mouth of the days old foulness of plaque. His gums ache and this is sweet, all of this. He wants to cry at the magnificence of it.

It’s a terribly long time before the water, going cool, runs clear. The towels are lush – lovely – and Mycroft’s pajamas, silky cotton with M.H embroidered at the pockets in tiny lettering, are too big,he has to tug the drawstrings tight, but heavenly soft. Sherlock can’t remember this manner of comfort, resting willingly in his reach, even though it’s only been eight months.

Something’s gone pear shaped; all he can really remember of his life in color are lines of cocaine on the bathroom sink, overflowing ashtrays and smoky red lights, dusty storage rooms with boxes and boxes of antiques, sleeping on the streets and sex in the back of run-down cars. Victor laughing in his ear, and running and running and running.

He’s kicked his discarded clothes uncaringly to a corner, and he’s almost out the door when he thinks to go through the pockets. He probes gingerly, discovering a twenty pound note, and with some surprise, a handwritten note.

It’s wet and flimsy, going yellow, and the ink blurred and thickened by dampness, but completely readable. _5th May, Noon, National Gallery.  – Vitya._

He doesn’t know what the date is, but he hasn’t seen Victor in what he’s sure is more than a month. He may have missed the meeting, and if he has, he doesn’t think much of it.

There, in the soft light of Mycroft's sterile bathroom, Sherlock runs his tongue along the sharp points of his teeth and thinks maybe he is done with Victor's mess.

He leaves the money among the clothes, and bins the underhanded note. 

 

The silver hands of Mycroft's kitchen clock points to three in the morning.

Mycroft sits on a stool at the counter in his shirtsleeves, the expensive cloth carelessly rolled up, gold cuff links lustrous on the dark wood. He's in his socks,feet hooked around the chrome legs. There is a carved chicken and bread,a tub of gravy, but only a small glass of amber liquid set before Mycroft.

"Eat", Mycroft says. "Talk if you like."

"Would like to eat, thanks." Sherlock pulls himself a stool. In the anticipation of food his stomach burns with hunger and he's doling a heap of meat and gravy into his plate - he doesn't care that Mycroft’s watching him - and scarfing it down.

"I remember you as a picky eater", Mycroft says, and looks mildly put off with the trail of juice creeping down the side of Sherlock's mouth."And somewhat civilized."

He wipes at his chin with the back of his hand and swallows."Food's never tasted better, Mycroft. I think I understand your proclivity."

Mycroft scrunches his nose and this is so familiar, in this strange new house and the strange new clothes and the strangeness of Mycroft himself, sipping his whiskey without his shoes, as though he's been taken apart and reassembled. It is like a relic from a lost time, and Sherlock's a long-lost traveler reunited with home.

He can't help grin at his brother around a mouthful of food.

"Oh, for God's sake, Sherlock", Mycroft says, and Sherlock remembers being fifteen, four Christmases ago, when Mycroft had returned home after an entire year of leaving him alone with _her_ , when Mycroft was so bloody smug and Sherlock sneaked a pink and white tongue of toad gut to his nightstand.

Big brother, little brother.

Right now, his glass has been empty for quite a bit. Big brother has assumed the role of a convivial police man and big brother is watching him like he's a hungry juvenile delinquent. All he needs is food, maybe a smile, and he's ready to talk.

To watch Mycroft attempt a friendly smile would be painful. Sherlock says, "I don't feel like talking tonight, if you don't mind. I've been running for a month."

"All I need to know", Mycroft says, dropping all pretense and looking as though he's been granted reprieve," is who you've been running from."

Sherlocks chews at length,so Mycroft prods,"Your boyfriend?"

"No."

"If you'll tell me... I have resources. Give me a name."

"Yeva Kostyshyn. You won't find her."

"What does she want from you?"

"All manner of things, I expect", Sherlock tells him. "I'm clean, I'm nourished, I'm not expecting to sleep on the streets tonight, and I'd love to not to think about her for once."

Mycroft concedes with a slight tilt of head, fingers raised for a second like in surrender, and backs away from the kitchen island with his glass . There's the hiss of the tap, and Sherlock licks the last of the gravy from his finger.

"Go find your room then", Mycroft says."Don't forget to floss."

 

Sherlock's still appraising the quiet walls and furniture when Mycroft swoops in to check on him. "Everything to your liking, I expect?"

On his nightstand is _Honeybee Democracy_ , shining letters under the lamp. There's a tall bookshelf, stacked with his chemistry books, old newspapers, music, and, oddly enough, several volumes on Machiavelli. Even that fails to bother him.The closet is fully hung with clothes meant to be his size, clothes that will become his size once he isn't quite so emancipated. 

He found his violin case behind a row of button downs, with the old S.H embossed in gold. It was the same old violin inside, waiting for him, repaired beautifully. A hot itchy feeling blooms in his chest, sliding his hands over its body, and he's sorry he smashed it all those months ago, just to spite Mummy, just to spite Mycroft, who looked so grim.

"You were expecting me", Sherlock says.

"This was always meant to be your room."

"I'm a bit too tired to read tonight."

"Suit yourself." They eye each other. "Well,don't expect me to tuck you in."

"No", Sherlock says, and on an impulse he takes Mycroft's hand, brushing wrists, and  looks at his brother until he reels Sherlock into an embrace and Sherlock can do nothing but smell his grapefruit and leather and wool, and feel the warmth of him, the pump of his blood, their blood, they blood they've shared between them. _Blood under the bridge_ , Sherlock thinks disjointedly. Or was it water?

_Oh, shut up._

Mycroft brushes against his hair, and then he gently relinquishes him, leaving him to the cold. Sherlock watches him breathe calmly.

"Get some rest", he says, and Sherlock says "Thank you", after him like an afterthought, and Mycroft shrugs. Filial duty.

The covers are turned down just so,and the pillow sinks,so soft under his head.

Sherlock doesn't dream.

 

Waking up is unnatural.

He doesn’t feel as though he's falling off the face of Earth, there's no sudden blaze of panic, no ache or nausea of any sort. He feels fine and it's odd. He gets out of bed to check his limbs.

Afternoon light creates a bright, cream hue behind the curtains. Sherlock rubs sleep out of his eyes and doesn't bother with the bed. There is hot water, the remnants of a breakfast on the table downstairs and Mycroft is gone, leaving Sherlock to fend for himself against the heavy hush of the house.

Although, he doesn't mind the hush so much. It is an infinite improvement from waking up on the squawking and honking streets.

Sherlock dresses in one of the shirts. It trails off his shoulders as though he were a hanger. He wounds a belt through the loops and then he goes about poking through the rooms. He finds Mycroft's bedroom with dim, grey walls and a neatly made bed. The window, rigged to a furtive little alarm, looks out to a sequoia grove.

There's a note on the plain desk, waiting for him along with keys and a slim, black mobile phone and a couple of banknotes, with Mycroft's neat handwriting.

 _Use it well_ , Mycroft writes.

Sherlock swipes through the phone. Mycroft is his only contact.

Quickly he texts, _the geometry of this place is maddening -SH._

He lingers through the elaborate dining room and a little sitting room adjoining the library with the opulent, floor length windows and Mycroft's selection of volumes on strategy. The door to his office is pointedly shut, so Sherlock turns the handle and peers in.

Again rigged to the door is another alarm,blinking frantically and Sherlock jumps when something buzzes. He realizes it's his phone.

_Feel free to explore. -MH._

While the rest of the house is spare, modern and quite bare, the office is thick with carpets and rugs, padded furniture and draperies. It's quieter than any of the rooms and Sherlock approaches the large desk almost apprehensively - he's holding his breath - as though afraid of waking someone, or something, up.

The gleaming surface of the desk is blank, and Sherlock passes through the drawers to find nothing he understands at a glance, maps and blueprints, strategic footholds of sorts. It isn't until he settles into Mycroft's chair, swinging this way and that with a file containing satellite photographs of some foreign encampment, that he notices _The School of Athens_ in its gilded frame, the complicated Raphael copy hung under the soft light,as pure and as perfect as ever.It isn't until he notices the painting that he also notices that everything in this room has been picked out from the house. That house. Her house.

It is a Frankenstein's monster-esque horror; it's like seeing dead limbs stitched onto a live man, and there's a lurching burn in his stomach like a swallow of poison. He springs out of the chair and tosses the file on the desk so that the photos spill and fan out. 

Immediately he feels like he's ruined something and he can hear, distantly, the loud frown, the snap of disapproval, her smooth voice like ice.

Sherlock stumbles out of the room and shuts the door. He leaves the house, and because he has the phone, he knows Mycroft will find him.

 

Sherlock moves aimlessly, counting minutes.He takes the tube, alights somewhere white tiled and underground in eleven minutes and he meanders, lingering among the chattering people, willing himself, _don't think, don't think, don't think._

It's no good, and he's hungry, so he steps into the first café he finds, and it's still no good because the woman eyes him with narrow suspicion, just like Mummy used to do, when he leans on the counter and selects a pastry, pointing.

He sits far away from the windows in a shadowy niche and stirs sugar into his coffee. Even the people don't help; they're all so terribly middling, so anodyne, that Sherlock can deconstruct them in a flash, leaving the detritus of their plodding lives to blow away like bits of torn paper in the wind.

Everything in this world is blotchy and colorless. Sherlock can't help return to the cool and easy composition of colors that Mycroft salvaged from the house, along with their mother's treasured little things. Things that she regarded with more fond affection then she had ever regarded him, and Mycroft forever seemed to want to extend into one of these things. Pure, well-made, perfect, with his new abstemious ways. He's always tried so hard.

It seems tasteless, vulgar even, since she's dead.

But it makes his ribs hurt. He recalls her crafted, glossy ringlets, pearl skin, the grey apron she'd wear over her cashmere and silk, bent with her paintbrush, something flashing on her slim wrist. There were so many copies of Raphael. She did them over and over again, contemplated them for hours and hours, and she was her happiest then. Voice light and free, she was the idolater in prayer.

She would talk of his _pure and perfect harmony, the pitch of perfection_ , and then when she looked at her youngest son, there was some resignation, some odium, some wary fear. _How can I have created that._ The sight of him upset Mummy.

It mattered to him because it mattered to Mycroft, and it matters to Mycroft still so it's gnawing at him again. There were always instances, like iterations, like deja vu, when Mycroft tried to teach his little brother, at five, at eleven, at fifteen, to mold himself into one of those chairs, one of those rings, one of those paintings that Mummy loved so much.

They fought. They made little cracks on the glass, Sherlock vibrating with irritation, Mycroft hissing at him, holding his wrists like manacles, even though they were constructing a basic engine together on the floor of the library only two minutes ago.

Everything could be a precursor to a fight, and the plethora of fights have grown into one another, so he doesn't know now exactly why he left all those months ago. There were so many fights, for so many years.

The coffee is bitter, he feels ill with something like hate, and he needs a cigarette. 

The waitress is fresh-faced and kind, married and trying for baby in that imprudent way people do regardless of their finances. Her name-tag reads Bianca. She smiles at him and brings him more coffee and the plate of pie he asked for, taking him, perhaps, for an overworked university student. He asks her what the date is. She tells him it's the 4th of May, which is the date on his phone as well as the newspaper he's picked up around the corner. He says thank you and attempts a smile.

She's sympathetic as she whisks away with the coffee pot.

4th of May means he has a day to get away from Mycroft.

As soon as he thinks this, Mycroft appears at entrance with an umbrella.

"Ah,hello", Mycroft says, feigning surprise. "May I sit?" He's already putting a chair.

"Does it matter if I say no?"

"Don't be hostile, I come bearing gifts." Mycroft produces a pack of cigarettes and the lighter from the glove box which Sherlock takes eagerly. "Besides, I thought you enjoyed our little à deux last night."

"There was food. And I've got no one else to talk  to."

"Yes, yes. It's tragic." Mycroft frowns about for a waitress. "I thought you'd be limiting your movements, with a murderer on your tail."

Sherlock takes a sharp drag and coughs. Mycroft gives him a look as Bianca steps towards them, smiling and smiling.

"You found her? You found Yeva?"

Mycroft orders a salad and pea soup, and takes his time with his phone. He says, "She's not in the country, you know."

Sherlock deflates back into his chair and exhales properly. "You didn't find my Yeva."

Mycroft raises an eyebrow. " _Your_ Yeva?"

"Don't be juvenile, Mycroft, you know what I mean."

"Well",Mycroft says dully. "Ukrainian,about five feet ten, epicene features, linked to art heists across Europe. Word is she's notorious for killing off security, technical and human."

The art heists Sherlock was aware of, but he didn't know about the dead guards. It stings at him, for some reason, though it's distinctive of Yeva. "Where is she,then?"

"Not in the country. Her trail goes cold in Belgium."

Bianca arrives with her tray and smile. Outside, it begins to rain. Sherlock watches Mycroft eat, methodical and with relish. He flicks at the glowing rim of his cigarette, letting the white smoke curl and drop from between his teeth.

"She might be here, though", he says, and Mycroft shakes his head.

"We'd know if she was. And we'll know when she arrives, if she chooses to. Though that would be unwise. Interpol is quite eager, to say the least."

"Since when do you work with Interpol?"

"Oh, _I_   don't work with anyone", Mycroft looks scandalized. "What I mean to say is airport security is on top of the matter, even if she's travelling under a nom de guerre."

Mycroft eats, and Sherlock smokes, listening idly to the squeak of the door, people chattering, the rain outside. Somewhere there is the spray and hiss of cooking, and Mycroft eyes the pastries with longing.

"What does she want with you?"

"I couldn't tell you."

"How did you meet her?"

"Mutual friend."

Mycroft's derisive eyebrows creep towards his hairline. He'd advised once, right before he left for university, one leaving in a long series of leavings, to suffer the fools quietly.

"A manner of friends", Sherlock tell his brother.

She isn't anyone's friend, Yeva. Not truly. Sherlock has met her a handful of times, under the blue smoke of bars or one of Victor's hotel rooms, and she was always evasive. He remembers his shock when she kissed Victor outside a bar on one of their gusty Amsterdam nights, and Victor laughed, salacious against her, like he later laughed at Sherlock's irritation.

(Sherlock remembers his laugh most of all. Vitya laughed and laughed and laughed, hysterical, demented laughter, and Sherlock laughed with him.)

They were sometimes with a swinish man, pink faced and florid, who called himself her husband. Sherlock asked her who he really was, and she rolled her pale eyes, _you know too much_ , and told him he was Borys, her brother.

He was more likely to have been her husband, and Sherlock did know too much. In the last days of Amsterdam, jittering through a horrific withdrawal in the cold of his hotel room, it was what Victor said to him, arranging a towel around his bare shoulders. _Shit, Sherlock. You always know too much_.

"Well, don't look quite so mournful", Mycroft says, crunching the last of his leaves."I'm sure we'll find this murdering friend of yours soon enough."

Bianca gives him a supportive smile, wiping a table as they exit, and Mycroft says,"Besides, you get to meet my barber."

When did his life become so strange?

"Droll", Sherlock says. He hates Mycroft's car.

They don't talk about Mummy.

 

 

There's a Rembrandt exhibition at the National Gallery, the cultured Londoners wavering in silent little groups through the rows and Rembrandt's sad eyes gazing back at their awe. Sherlock's not exactly late, but it's a little past noon because it took him too long to slip past Mycroft, who's being appallingly vigilant.

He's slipped the tethering phone between the sofa cushions, skirted the cameras to the best of his ability, and Victor is nowhere in sight.

He grits his teeth and moves with the tourers, hands deep in his pockets. He recognizes these, from years of flipping through the books in the country, as the late works, the master's decline, and the gloom of these paintings creates for him a sense of dread, of being at the end of his tether and as helpless against life as an upended turtle.

He thinks Victor's done this on purpose, to torture. It's revenge, though Victor's not one to hold petty grudges.

There's an indistinct buzz, cultivated gesturing, people tilting towards each other to hear better, and people eavesdropping for a snatch of history or insight.

These are a bizarre brand of people, Sherlock decides. They're swaying together,detaching and re-amassing, like in a gelatinous, bacterial dance, their faces rapt and respectful. They're of a surprising variety, but Sherlock has them reduced to a common denominator. Dull.

He waits, hands deep in his pockets and lingering until the guards are watching him and probably the security team too, with their shrewdly concealed cameras, on some monitors somewhere, and Sherlock isn't too keen on the doldrums of being questioned, since there's enough of that at home. He turns to a painting he's arrived at without really noticing, and thinks of leaving.

Like magic,Victor appears beside him.

" _The Conspiracy of the Bativans Under Claudis Civilis_ ",he says. That's what the black rectangle says below the painting, but he didn't read from it. "Commissioned in 1660, you know. For the Amsterdam town hall." The tenor of his voice sends a swoop through Sherlock's gut.

"Yes, all very interesting."

Victor smiles one of his wry smiles,his heavy bottom lip turning his mouth into a picturesque love-heart. He's freshly clean, but hasn't gotten the bit of dirt behind his ear, and Sherlock would have loved to see him as dirty and starved as he had been, as half-dead.

He immediately feels badly for it. Annoying.

Of course,Victor isn't like him, or like anyone. Where ever he goes, even if he's sleeping on the streets, Victor has it better than everyone, and he smiles and he smiles and he smiles, mouth dark, eyes dark, hair fair and curling at his temple. The corners of his slim nose used to be red and rabbity with cocaine, but he's clean today. He's been clean for a while.

His face has a golden hue, a smattering of light freckles; he's been wandering around the Mediterranean shores like he said he would. Sherlock pictures him watching the sea with berry stained lips.

Victor wouldn't look amiss in one of those Irish paintings with the pretty young peasants; seductive and mischievous.

He winks at Sherlock,says, "What do you think?"

"I think it's desperate."

Victor leans, arms crossed and rocks on his heels."Desperate and mad, isn't it? There's our Claudius Civilis' empty eye-socket,a void in his skull, no? See how it's emphasized, draws the eye from those ghosts over there. Aren't they just like ghosts, glowing like that on their own?  War and freedom are empty myths, just a bunch of ghosts hanging onto a blind ruins of a man. They removed this from the town hall, you know. Rejected."

"Of course they did", Sherlock says. There's no nation, only madness. And desolation.

He's tense so he fidgets and he wishes he could smoke. While Victor goes languid and happy with the adulation that some works of art soak up and swell with, Sherlock is fraught with critical tension, stiff and tight jawed. He toys with Mycroft's lighter in his pocket, and looks away from one despairing face to find Victor looking at him.

Softly, easily, Victor blinks.

"Yeah", he says.

Sherlock moves along a row of gloomy paintings and Victor slides into step, hands clasped behind him.

"Thanks for seeing me. I thought maybe you wouldn't."

"I thought maybe I wouldn't too."

"Well", Victor shrugs. "Here you are."

"I don't know why. How did you know I'd come to London?"

Victor laughs. "Where else would you go? I think you're drawn to London, subconsciously. "

Sherlock elects not to comment. Victor has a way of splitting open the matter, openly and honestly. Its unusual and unsettling.

"Well, I'm here. What do you want?"

He sounds clipped, angrier than he is, the tone of voice he uses to flatten other plebeians. Victor isn't other plebeians, though he looks, drawing his brow together, slightly hurt.

"I wanted to see you. You left so quickly and I knew you wouldn't come back -"

"You told me to leave. To 'go rot in the slimiest pits of hell', if I remember correctly. Quite unwarranted for."

Victor's shaking his head. He says, "That was in the moment,Sherlock, I begged you to stay. At the airport, I begged you. And then you were so angry with me, there was nothing I could have said to change your mind."

Sherlock says nothing, looking at a carved piece of frame, so Victor says,"Sometimes when you say things, Sherlock, you don't know how much it hurts. You're so callous and it's like you don't care. You accuse my father of murder, and he'd gone missing for months, God, I was worried _sick_ , you should have heard yourself. You could have knifed me and it wouldn't hurt so much. Except it was true, and it hurts me even more that I just left you there like that in that horrid bathroom," he makes an inarticulate gesture, pained. "I shouldn't have left you when you were so sick, I just felt like I was gonna be sick myself."

These moments of honesty, scooped up from the recesses of sentiment, without malice or artifice - Sherlock has no idea how he should react to them.

"I didn't leave because of you", he tells Victor."It was because of Yeva."

Victor stares, blinks, "What's Yeva got to do with this?"

"We had an altercation of sorts, before you found me. I'd already decided to leave, and I thought it'd be appropriate for you to know what I'd found, before I left."

" _Appropriate_ , hell", Victor is incredulous. "I don't know where you get it from, Sherlock, but you're so damn cold, no, look, don't be angry with me anymore", he says, hasting to grab Sherlock's wrist as he turns away.

His palm is warm and grainy - he's been sitting around fishing, of all things - and he tugs Sherlock very close against his jumper. He seems taller, his eyelashes light and long. In absentia, Sherlock had forgotten the little crescent mark on his lip, one which Victor claims is the leftover of a skiing accident.

"No, look", he says, all warm breaths and smelling like soap, "I'm not criticizing,alright, I'm really not, I swear. I didn't spend a day in Amsterdam after you left, went straight to Belgium and I kept moving until I was sitting in this little boat all day, sun-burnt neck for weeks,I prolly got cancer, just fishing and wondering how I was gonna make it up to you and wondering if you'd come to meet me at all"

"Might have improved your chances if you hadn't asked to meet here, of all places."

Victor smiles, lips curling a bit sheepish,"I figured if you were willing to endure an _exhibition_ , I'd know you didn't hate me all that much."

"Bit presumptuous. I could be simply curious. Or bored."

"Well, I don't know.", Victor says,sliding against Sherlock, heady proximity, blood roaring in his ears."I hope you're not too bored right now.

Then Victor's kissing him, tilting his head, right there to the testimony of the Jewish Bride and the glint of her golden blouse. Sherlock finds Victor's throat,the wild,skipping pulse, and Victor makes a noise with his fingers in Sherlock's hair.

Sherlock's breath rattles in his chest, he's being kissed and he can't think, and yet he can't not think. Victor's lips are gritty and they taste like beer, and Sherlock knows the guards are watching, and the security team too maybe, with their cameras. He flushes because the room is hot, probably, and Victor says against his jaw, "Will you come with me?"

He draws away, thumbs at Sherlock's mouth when he doesn't reply. "Please come with me. Spend the night. I get nervous hanging around art exhibitions for too long these days."

"I have to get home."

"Come on. I'll get that Chinese takeout you like. We'll eat on the floor and I'll tell you a riddle. We'll fuck all night,yeah?"

 

Victor talks incessantly,and Sherlock listens, because that is what they do. Sherlock listens to Victor's nonsense, and Victor entertains his ideas with monumental enthusiasm.

Presently he's gesticulating with monumental enthusiasm, and talking at breakneck speed about the European sole as opposed to the various Pacific flatfish that are not in fact sole, just a flounder. About the doddering old codger who hobbled along the little houses in Amsterdam and once gave him three pounds of cocaine for free, crazy old bat, half of which were taken from him with extreme prejudice by some police people by the green water canals.

"...and you know how London welcomes me...I get here three days ago, bone-tired and seeing double, and there's this _massive,_ steamy cloud passing over the sun, everything grey and dirty...", and on and on and on, pressing very close to Sherlock. Sherlock watches his mouth and allows Victor to kiss him for long moments, jouncing at the back of a taxi.

He met Victor in that acrid and despairing year without Mycroft, when he was fifteen and Victor was a little older, and Sherlock, thin as a whip, sprained his ankle jumping barefoot off the gate and limped into Victor in the twilight,drunkenly delivering newspapers.

Victor laughed, his cheeks and nose bitten red, hair whipped up like cream and looking like a trickster with his shining eyes.

He rang his bicycle bell, high trills, and said," Might I offer you ride, sir?"

No reason not to, so Sherlock sat on top of the newspapers, the bicycle clamp cutting cold against his buttocks. Victor rode, drunk though he was, swiftly and surely, a chattering monkey, and Sherlock took instantly to his bounce, large motions in the air with his hands flying, raving like a mad man, the vigorous, devilish gleam in his eyes.

Victor seemed godsend amid the boredom. His eyes lit up, flit-spark inside his skull, and he never watched the path, twisting around to tell Sherlock about the girl he knew from London who died with her head in the oven..

Many houses later, with Sherlock chucking newspapers at them - _as hard as you can, aim for the puddle if you see one_ \- Victor asked, "So, where'd you want to go?"

His bottom ached, his foot was doughy and blue, it was bloody freezing, and Sherlock said,"Anywhere but back there."

"Ah. I recognize that", Victor laughed, pedaling madly.

It was a strange and sultry summer. Sherlock ate and slept and woke up in the little pub with roaring men that Victor had squirmed into by, Sherlock suspected, keeping the wide-mouthed Judy-the-bustling-owner's bed warm.

Sherlock spent the days sprawled on Victor's bed, thumbing through the texts on fishing, art and the endless volumes of poetry, or mopping the rotting floors, or he spent them behind the counter watching the men grunting about their wives and their work, all the same, and Victor with his towel over one shoulder, pointed his target with his forefinger like a gun, and said _go,_ and Sherlock would, in a race of words, deduce his mark. 

For every correct deduction,  Victor earned the delightful chore of mopping the floor, for the next two days, for the next five, for the next two weeks. Although there was always something, and Victor didn't mind. 

He whistled across the floors in a minute, manic energy, the bucket sloshing with muddy water. There was grime permanently under his finger-nails, his t-shirt ripped. He laughed and talked and winked and drank, his wrists flashing in perpetual motion. 

He swiped food off of Sherlock's plate, and Sherlock didn't mind. Sherlock's t-shirt was ripped, he had dirt under his fingernails.

He watched Victor breathe in the dark, when his eyes went feral and Sherlock couldn't tell what he was thinking because Victor burned at an exhaustive rate, whipping up flames in the air at flash point like acetone, and Sherlock wanted to put his hands in it. 

And he did.

If his mother missed him, he didn't know it, and he didn't miss her. When he ventured into the house to fetch his things for school, not quite crashing and banging into things, she didn't come up to see him.

They smashed in the windows of the garden shed together, swinging their bats hard to create the loudest crashes, and Victor said, "This is good therapy, this", the back of his neck glazed with sweat. He held a triangular shard of glass to the sun to create a golden glare at the tip.

There were so many days. There was the one, on the brink of Mycroft's Christmas arrival, when he and Victor tried to fashion fireworks and stupidly set fire to a discarded field. The corn husks crumpled and curled. Sherlock tugged on Victor's elbow, and Victor caught his sleeve, stumbling away but in delight. 

They watched the fire writhe and spit, perched on a nearby wall like two birds, elbow to elbow, the cracking of fire like music in the air. _Gold star_ , Victor said.

They ran when the flames licked too close, and ran until they were laughing too hard to move and their guts _hurt_.

Sherlock touched Victor by the side of a hill, and Victor kissed him ashy, and that was that.

Sherlock showed up for Mycroft's arrival sporting an ash streaked face, t-shirt torn and singed, wearing Victor's (destroyed) boots, and thoroughly kiss-rumpled, just to watch their eyes go round.

 _I know you miss him something dreadful,_ Victor had said, lounging with Tolstoy on the creaking floor. _You should tell him._

He didn't because that would be a display of sentiment, because it was Mycroft and him, and they weren't affectionate. Sherlock had become acclimatized to Victor's fire, and suddenly Mycroft's frost was disconcerting; Sherlock watched, wary like a wild animal when Mycroft hissed, _behave_.

There were many days and many kisses. Sherlock left before Mycroft did. The world tilted somehow, and Victor put his lanky limbs around Sherlock,humming in the dark.

 

Victor takes him to a saggy building as it's getting dark. It's possibly illegal and devastatingly filthy, with a door to the flat that Victor spends many minutes swearing in front of, trying to unlock.

 "It doesn't lock, and if it does, it won't unlock", he says, exasperated, and kicks the squeaking door for Sherlock to step through into a drafty flat with cinder-block walls and yellowish, grainy light.

There's a desk and several crates for furniture. The floor sprawls with a happy jumble of objects, true to form, and Victor leads him through a path forged among the heaps of clothes and packages and books. "Nice isn't it? Beats the streets, certainly." He sets the plastic bags of fragrant Chinese takeout on a crate.

"London is the worst place to sleep on the streets in", he says knowledgeably. "Besides maybe New York in the summer with the heat, burns like hell and the damn _rats_ everywhere. Once I was woken up by a man pissing on me, can you imagine?"

Sherlock rescues a crumpled Matisse print from the floor, with lobster-red men twisted like clay, while Victor hops around, gathering trousers and pants from piles and tossing them into smaller piles. "How'd you find this so fast?"

"Oh, I didn't", Victor says. "Borya leased it for I don't know how long, and he was leaving when I got here so it's mine now. You remember Borya, the big fat bastard who ate all the kalbasa in the house in Kharkov once? Did you know he was in London?"

He knows Borys was in London, and he's glad to know Borys has left London.

Borys hunted him on and off since he got here, ungraciously trashing his bedsit, and looming up behind him on the streets so that Sherlock had to duck and hide. It kept things interesting, until it didn't, because Borys was so easy to spot and run away from, with his bulging torso and loud, swanky shirts.Then it kept things tedious.

He doesn’t want to talk about Borys.

"I remember you tried to make pudding and ruined half the bread."

"Hey," Victor points a threatening finger, sock dangling from his hand to be tossed into a hill of socks. "You ate it, and you liked it."

"That is an appalling lie. I am shocked at you."

" _You_ ate whatever Borys couldn't get his paws on and _I_ starved for days and days."

"I refuse to participate in this absurd conversation", Sherlock says and Victor laughs.

"Then I digress", he says, so courteous. He takes Sherlock by the arms, staggering him to a crate, cushion thrown on top, and sits him down."We have food now and we must have that celebratory drink because I've got _you_ now, where did I keep that bottle..." He rubs his hands together.

There isn't enough for Victor to get drunk, and though there's plenty to affect Sherlock, they eat too much for anything to touch them. Sherlock feels soggy and saturated, lazy and lumbering like an elephant because he's eaten more in the past two days than he ever has before.

Victor talks about craving grape pie with ice-cream, and pours them two little glasses of port. Sherlock drinks quickly, grimaces at the sting behind his eyes.

They sit against the damp wall, pants unbuttoned, passing a cigarette between them, and Sherlock rambles about lead content variation in the top soil across London, and Victor listens, nodding and patient, like back in Judy's pub all those years ago when they sat cross legged on the wooden slats and outlined the perfect crime.

There's so little that's criminal in this. Sherlock is warm and Victor is drowsy, his head on Sherlock's shoulder. Sherlock stubs the cigarette out on the wall. Victor says, "Hey, don't do that", and "Lets go to bed".

Sherlock catches his hips when he stands and slides a hand up the grey jumper.

Victor looks down at him. His mouth is parted.

"I love you," he says.

 

 Sherlock dreams fleetingly of wispy hair in the wind, Moscow's golden domes, distant snatches of Tchaikovsky's overture and Victor's laugh, fluttering like a flag in the wind. He wakes up suddenly, like coming out of water, and breathes.

Victor's arm pins him to the bed. Victor is breathing in his neck. The last month has been strange because he hasn't woken up this way, and now it's strange because he has. He stares at the ceiling and he doesn't move because Victor is a dangerously light sleeper. Victor moves against the painful spot on his calf from when he was kissed into the edge of an obscure crate.

There are so many things everywhere, Sherlock has picked up the tendency to clutter from him, but the bedroom is nearly monkish. Sherlock saw, on the nightstand, that Victor has framed the old picture of his mother in silver, and sweatily moving against Sherlock, he panted, "Dear god, turn my mother away, will you?" And then he did it himself.

Sherlock knows every square millimeter of this photograph. He's seen it so many times because Victor gathers and loses possessions constantly, but keeps his mother very close, though she already appears in his hair and his eyes and the softness of his mouth. She even appears in his accent, though he grew up in many parts of Britain since he was seven, when she died, he tells Sherlock, in a skiing accident.

Yet she's there when he talks too fast, which is always, and slips into the Slavic syllables. He employs it on purpose sometimes,in overly affectionate sobriquets, calling Sherlock his _lapochka. Lyubov moya. Sheryush,Shevochka. Lochic, with kisses._

 _I was born to watch the dissolution of the Soviet Russia_ , he brags often, and though he had no way of remembering it or comprehending it at the time, he talks about coupons and people shambling into lines because there was no food and money was nothing. He talks about his mother, who taught history in Moscow, getting paid with socks, so many socks, socks that everyone had and were supposed to sell for food products that nobody had, and money was _nothing_. They lived in a little matchbox flat and it was always cold.

 _Money becomes nothing_ , he says, snapping his fingers, _just like that._

He drinks his drink like a curmudgeonly old man, he smacks his lips and he says,"People want too much of the wrong thing."

Sherlock's face itches, and he wakes Victor when he moves.

"Just the feel of you is getting me going", Victor mumbles, warm with sleep and rolling half on top of Sherlock, hot skin, and really, it has been too long, even though they've gone longer without each other in the past and a few weeks are nothing.

They know each other best after five years of sharing and sharing and sharing. Victor knows his skin and bones and Sherlock knows his pulse; they know how to best deliver to each other the maximum amount of pleasure, how to bring it quick and how to prolong it. Victor devotes himself, and his attention is like sweet nicotine; Sherlock wants more, more and more and more, once he get some.

Victor wears him out and kisses his jaw. Sherlock dozes until he realizes Victor's asked him something.

"What?"

"I said what did you fight with Yeva about? Must've been bad if it made you decide to leave without me."

"That's a sound conclusion", Sherlock says.

Victor slides up on his elbow to look down at him. "Don't stall."

"Let's talk about it later." Sherlock tries to kiss Victor to distraction. It almost works.

"Was it me you fought about?"

It was his father they fought about, but Sherlock says,"Yes."

"Why?"

"I can't remember now", he lies. Victor can tell.

"You'll tell me later?"

"Alright", he says. Victor passes a tender hand through his hair.

 

Victor wakes up while Sherlock is struggling with trousers and laughs at his fumbling irritation.

His shirt is ripped and ruined. He casts around until he finds Victor's jumper and tugs it on. Victor is singing something lewd, arms behind his head and grinning at Sherlock like a maniac.

"I know you like me for my risque", he teases, so Sherlock has to lean down and kiss him. With some compunction,he scribbles down Mycroft's address on his palm, and Victor whistles.

It's still early when he gets there. He digs into his pockets for keys and slips in as silently as he can. He makes it past the staircase and into his room, which seems too unfamiliar to really be his, and he's tugging off Victor's jumper when Mycroft clears his throat, like stone grinding on stone.

He doesn't seem angry,leaning against the door frame like that with this ankles crossed, but Sherlock can't tell anymore. He feels an embarrassment, unwarranted for - he can do what he likes - but he flushes under Mycroft's look, and it's idiotic, pedestrian behavior. Not his fault, besides, because Victor's left a spate of bites along his chest, and Mycroft eyes them with something Sherlock can't identify.

"Gone to see your precious Vitya?"

"Yes." Sherlock moves to the closet to tug out a shirt,cross with himself.

"You left this", Mycroft shakes the phone at him and throws it down on the desk. The clatter it makes is angry. Definitely angry. Sherlock realizes he's buttoning his shirt wrong.

"Oh. It must have fallen out."

"Don't be dull, Sherlock, you didn't even sit on that sofa. If you wanted to go undetected, you could at least make an effort."

"I thought you'd get the message", Sherlock nods at the phone.

It goes quiet. Sherlock rebuttons his shirt and looks at his brother.

"I didn't know if you'd come back."

"Well, what would it matter? I'm not your pet cat, go buy yourself a real one if you're so lonely."

"Amusing. I'll simply but a bell on you, if it comes to that. Are you aware who your boyfriend's flat is leased to?"

"Yes, yes, yes. I know."

"He's a known associate of this woman who you claim is hunting you."

"If you're done stating things I already know, I'd love some breakfast, please."

Mycroft straightens and now he's blatantly angry, jaw moving. "I thought, after all this damaging clowning you'd developed some sense and put that Victor Trevor behind you."

"What? Do know what you sound like, Mycroft, put him behind me like he's some sort of a car crash."

"Isn't he? After all that fiasco with the drugs and overdosing like some bovine teenager -"

" _Fiasco_ -"

"After all Mummy had to put up with, that ridiculous boy and you, upsetting her every chance you got -"

" _I_ didn't have to do anything with anything or anyone, Mycroft, I upset Mummy simply by breathing."

"You never made an effort."

"Did you make an effort? Did she make an effort?"

"Don't be such a needy child."

"You weren't even there, at that stupid hospital. I'm sure you knew, didn't you? It's so easy for you now to stand around so superior calling it a _fiasco_."

"Victor was there, was he? To pick up your fragile little pieces? You realize he put there in the first place, don't you? Surely you aren't quite so stupid."

"Victor had nothing to do with happened."

"No? Do you know the cut Victor makes for every person he gets hooked on your choice drug? Do you know the size of his father's drug cartel? There wasn't even a hospital the second time you overdosed, was there? He'd let you die to shield himself."

"There was no hospital because he was there the first time and he knows anything is better than a bloody hospital with those lights and those sententious nurses sniffing at me like a profligate, so fucking condescending. They think what they want to do is help but all they want is that superiority. It's like waking up to find out you're still alive and the world is still full of people like you, and people like that mother of ours."

This is what they've become. Mycroft is composed in the imitation of Mummy, and Sherlock is burning in the rebellion against her. This is what they are now.

Mycroft's withdrawing already, looking aloof. "You're like a stray dog, loping around anyone who offers you the tiniest bit of affection."

"Don't talk about affection, Mycroft. You don't know what it is. You and that woman. I used to hate the way you'd fold yourself around her like a fucking machine made of steel but that's just what you deserve."

Sherlock is spitting, angry, and now Mycroft is glib, and that makes him angrier. Mycroft says, in a bored tone, already turning away," In that case, I suppose you deserve the desecrated corpse Victor Trevor is going to turn you into."

He leaves Sherlock fuming, with that old ache in his ribs and the many, many cracks on the glass.

 

Acting on a wild impulse, as always, Sherlock leaves.

He finds a shopping bag and blindly throws a collection of items into it. He counts the money and finds he's barely spent any, and, like ripping off a band-aid, he leaves.

He hasn't returned to this little bedsit until Borys arrived and slimed things up. Sherlock hated, still hates to think of Borys watching him and finding him and slipping into his domain unnoticed.  It's unnerving.

Besides, he already has one man on his tail, one man too many.

Obviously Borys didn't find what he was looking for in here, and obviously he assumed Sherlock had it on him, and Sherlock encouraged this notion.

He discards his bag on the narrow bed, with it's mattress like a sheet of plaster, and crawls beneath the rotting desk to find the loose brick to pull out a zip bag with the infamous items.

They're there just as he left them: Mr. Trevor's thick, leather wallet and the photograph of Mrs. Trevor with her sister, innocuous little things into which the notoriety of Victor's family has diffused into, like everything else they touched. This is evidence, so Sherlock gets off his knees and finds a shirt to extract the wallet with.

Mr. Trevor's still in there, glowering at Sherlock from his blood smeared I.D picture. He remembers his growling, breathing in the dim bar like a great, filthy animal.

 _Little friend_ , he called Sherlock, winking, the first and only time they met.

Though Sherlock has almost met him a second time at the largely abandoned house in Kharkov, under even more unpleasant terms, and if it hadn't been for Victor's frantic warning, eyes wide and shaking his head, Victor might not have been the only one curled on the floor and biting his tongue from the sickening, crunching blows, quite unable to move.

Sherlock had touched Victor's face, when it was over and Trevor had stalked away, and blood trickled through his fingers, Trevor's mad screams ringing in his ears.

"Victor, are you dead?" He whispered, rendered stupid with fright in this fingers, and Victor laughed a grotesque laugh, his lips wet with blood, blood pooling on his tongue, his teeth outlined in red.

It's strange what people can do with brute strength and an amount of madness. He thought it was strange,spying from behind the door frame, that anyone could reduce the defiant ball of electricity that Victor is into that trembling boy, head hung and hands behind his back, muttering _yessir_ , and _no sir_.

Victor hissed and Sherlock helped him up the sweeping stairs and into one of the rooms, full of beds from when a family shared the room during the communist Russia.

Sherlock ducked into a bathroom to retrieve a towel and a bowl of water, and vomited until he couldn't breathe.

It was the first time he'd nursed anyone, and it would be his last. They shake on the bed together, Sherlock trying to keep Victor awake and wiping blood off his temple. He realized then where the little crescent marks marring Victor's body kept coming from. Not from bizarre skiing accidents, but from the ring Trevor wore all the time like an insignia.

For the rest of their time there, they were not only cold and broke, but also fearful. Victor hobbled around for days, palm on his stomach when he laughed painfully.

It doesn't matter now, because Sherlock knows he's dead. Victor doesn't know he's dead, and Sherlock'd rather not tell him, because even though Sherlock's glad, Victor loves his conniving gorilla of a father,murderous though he may be.

Sherlock remembers the way Victor shrugged at the airport, when Sherlock said, _he killed your mother_ , and Victor said, _he's still my father._  

It makes him think of his own parents, both dead, and he wonders if there's something wrong with him.

He shrugs it off because this is a disastrous line of thought, this is when his brain begins to eat itself. He looks through the clear plastic at Victor's mother, smile frozen in place, the same lusty eyes. She's standing arm in arm with a girl in the snow, matching braids and matching coats like sisters.

Victor talks often of his great grandfather and the wealth of art with which he fled after the Tsars, and his grandfather who devoted half his life questing for it. He blathers about his mother when he's upset, her flittering smiles, eating borse and steak for dinner, flipping through her books in the evening and going for walks in the snow in their boots. He even talks about his father and his trade in the underground, the black market exchange of valuable art for drugs, masterpieces vanishing for a desperate fix in the dark.

He's never talked about an Aunt, and Sherlock hasn't asked about this picture he retrieved from snooping through Yeva's things.

Victor tells him he met Yeva among the frames of stolen Degas sketchers in one of his father's warehouses, that they're business friends, that, for some reason, Sherlock shouldn't be jealous - which he bears with irritation,  he's not _jealous_ , he shudders at the thought - but Sherlock's found a photograph among Yeva's things of Victor's mother and her obvious sister with the curiously epicene features.

Quite a bit of tragedy there. 

He's been woolgathering in the distant noise of bickering residents and speeding cars when something loud and shrill sounds very close by and Sherlock startles and drops the bag.

He's brought the phone with him by accident, tossed among some clothes and ringing stubbornly as Sherlock rummages. He pulls out a shirt and it falls out with a loud thud on the bed.

It's not Mycroft's number, though it could be Mycroft. Sherlock picks up anyway. Victor yells in his ear.

"You gave me the wrong address, you bastard", Victor is laughing.

"Oh god."

"I met your brother and he said something uppity with that half-lidded bored thing he does and gave me this number. Told him I liked his umbrella, why does he hate me so much? Never mind that, tell me where you are."

 

 Victor brings grape pie and ice cream,looks around fast and says, "Ah. Nostalgia."

"Boring", Sherlock remarks, but nostalgia indeed.

They eat from the container with plastic forks,sitting on the synthetic carpet against the bed. Victor licks his fork and uses his fingers. Sherlock lets Victor kiss him, sticky fingers on his throat, and they forget about the ice cream until it melts all over their laps and the carpet, and Victor says, "Why does this keep happening to us?"

Victor is nostalgic by nature. He's prone to long moments of reminisce, and it's as though he revels in these moments, conjuring the past with a faraway glitter in his eyes.

 _My life will just fly away_ , he said once, _if I don't commit the details to memory. I need to remember what happens._

 It doesn't make much sense to Sherlock until he's creeping this way and that through Europe as an extension of Victor. Then it does make sense in the way that faces burr and a way of life falls away and grows smaller and smaller in the distance, when they keep taking off in that way, becoming whispers in the wind.

Victor reckons he was born nostalgic, but Sherlock thinks he knows better.

"No, no", Victor disagrees. "I was that way before she died. I remember so clearly. I remembered the dresses she wore and the perfumes she used in the summer and I used to remember the class I used to be in and when the leaves turned and it snowed I'd be nostalgic for the summer and then when it was summer I'd remember the coats and the radiator humming. Even then, I don't know, it seems somewhat preternatural doesn't it, yes, yes, don't roll your eyes at me, but listen, I just feel like I always knew I'd lose all of it, you know?"

"I remember everything after her, when she died. My father looming in those charcoal suits of his, and I'd never even seen him before. He took me to London and I didn't see him for months at a time but he wasn't too terrible back then. I learned English watching the telly and there were books and no one cared if I went to school or didn't. There the paintings took me. I remember they'd concealed a Rembrandt in one of the buildings. I found it when I was eleven, _the storm on the sea of galilee_. I used to spend hours and hours in front of it. The tilted ship, the froth and the clouds, chiaroscuro, the way my life was."

"Why is it art for everyone?" Sherlock frowns. "What bearing does it possibly have?"

"We have art in order not to die of the truth", Victor quotes sagely, and then when Sherlock looks unconvinced, "It's like your puzzles or your music."

"Music engages the mind."

"As does art,in a subtler way. It's in the study of it. I know you're going to say something like _it's just a stylized composition of paint_ , but you could also say a Beethoven symphony is just a variation of wave pressure. It's in the study of it where art can really blow away the dust from life. Like you, when we were sleeping on the streets in Paris and we'd stolen that violin, you remember? And you swaying with that tune in the light with your eyes closed and you looked so calm and so beautiful under the stars and I knew I really loved you. It's trite, but that's what it is. It's the devotion to the device. Why do you think the Renaissance loves the rapturous in prayer so much?"

Sherlock is embarrassed to be referred to that way. "It's irrelevant to existence", he says.

He's sitting on the tapering bed, and Victors sits on the floor, sideways near his feet. He takes Sherlock's palm and runs a nail along the lines.

"Just because you think it's irrelevant, doesn't mean you can't admire it."

There are so many things. Victors talks in his dreaming, whimsical way in the pockets of stillness, and Sherlock listens to him through the day, through many days.

"I remember so many happy moments after Mama died. I think it's because I was so sad that every bright thing burned even brighter. You feel like shit, rattling in a train all the time with nothing to eat besides sloppy train food, and you look out the window and the sun is coming up making the sky all sorts of colors, big and fat like a watermelon. That's the kind of sunrise you really remember, the spark of beauty in misery."

 Sherlock remembers the days after his mother's death as clearly as he remembers the days leading up to it, and he remembers no sunrises, no spark of beauty, not even sadness. Mycroft shouldered all these days on his own, it's what she wanted, and Sherlock was at Uni among the tepid posing of pseudo-intellectuals, the pabulum and drudgery of lectures.

Until Victor showed up in a drunken stupor of coincidence the day Mummy died and he threw up on Sebastian's shoes.

There was cocaine and a bedsit, the lights converging in pinpoints before his eyes. Victor's skin gleamed under him.

Sherlock didn't go to the funeral.

 

 They stay here for a long time. They do other things than talk. They wander through London at all hours,collecting meticulous soil samples and Victor looks over the Thames, says, _unreal city_ , says, _sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song_ , at the wind and kisses Sherlock every time he rolls his eyes, chuckle spread from ear to ear.

They ruin the bedsit with a noxious little explosion and the landlord demands they move. They take up residence in Victor's creaking flat and demolish it further with clutter and the skeletons of things they've used up and discarded.

(Sherlock conceals the evidence in an air vent.)

 They steal into Barts, Victor teaching how to charm and misdirect and pilfer equipment, chemicals, thumbs, whatever they can find, and once a little bald man in a lab-coat chases them out into the street where it's pissing down rain. Victor, his face swathed with a scarf and Sherlock, collar turned up, rip across the pavement, half concealing parts of a multiple wavelength refractometer in their jackets.

They smell of ammonia and cigarettes, old paper and the mild turpentine of oil paints. They smell like each other like they used to in the country, watching the fumes rise from the field. 

The nights burn with spicy takeout and nicotine, and there's no cocaine. Victor shows him how to properly pickpocket and they gather wallets and keys until there's a small pile in the kitchen next to the stove.

They memorize the streets of London together, lights and rooftops, overflowing rubbish bins and all night cafés, insects bouncing in the air, the lithe shadow of cats on the pavement. They pass the silvery fever rush between them, and duck under canopies to avoid the rain.

"I think we're in rats' alley, where the dead men lost their bones",Victor whispers.

"Dead rats", Sherlock whispers, and picks up its limp body by the tail.

He's having too much fun to think about Mycroft but sometimes, in the garish glow outside the pubs in the night, Sherlock can see the cameras move towards him. He still has the phone against his thigh, and sometimes he unreasonably expects it to buzz.

It doesn't. 

They're having too much fun but sometimes in the blue London mornings, Victor frightens him with nostalgia.

"You used to sleep spread-eagle and I used to be able to kiss you when I liked", he says against Sherlock's collar bone. "Now you sleep on your side and curl against my back. Not that I mind, because you don't kick me that way, but remember when..." And he says, "I loved your eyes when you came down from a high and I could see them go all clear again", and "I love every expression you wear, especially the one when we've just set fire to something."

It reminds him of how he talks of his mother, with smidgens of details like a flickering shine on the water.

_I just feel like I always knew I'd lose all of it._

This is unfair and it's because Victor has cheated; Victor the trickster, breathing hard and passing his skin against Sherlock's when Sherlock is already a toxic dump site of neurochemicals, dopamine and serotonin and goodness knows what other kinds of absolute witchery.

It makes him want to do injury, so he pins Victor into the sheets, their thighs aligning, just to watch his eyes go dark. Those honey-shot lusty eyes Sherlock has always loved so much

"I think over-exposure to criminal activity has driven you clinically insane", he says.

"I think you're a criminal activity", Victor says.

"We're just a pair of pyromaniacs", he says.

Sherlock's sleeplessness lingers even after Victor is dreaming, and Sherlock curls, very still against his back. He realizes this this an optimal position to think in, and wakes Victor when he bounds out of bed to scrawl down the latest line of thought.

Victor rolls into his warmth.

 

 Sherlock's not worried until one morning when they spill into the flat, reeking of garbage because they spent a night scouring through rubbish bins ( _romantic_ , Victor said) in the search for fruits at the perfect stage of rot.

Victor says, "I need a shower or you won't kiss me", and flings his clothes everywhere, but Sherlock's noticed something.

It's the smell of grapefruit, fresh, distinct from the smell of rot coming from his bag. It's the smell of Mycroft, scattered in the air. Sherlock sees the black violin case like an olive branch, set among the clutter of beakers and various crystallizing liquids. 

But there's something else. Something like intuition, which he despises, wrapping around him like a tongue.

With looming dread he moves up to the slats in the air vent and peers inside. He'd nearly forgotten about this.

Sherlock doesn’t panic, but the dread persists because Mycroft has taken the evidence, negating his feeble peace offering, and Sherlock can't begin to fathom what he might do with it. 

He remembers the phone, largely unused, in his pocket and digs it out.

 _Give it back_. -SH.

Mycroft replies in an instant.

 _Don't lose your head. I only took it for mild amusement_. -MH.

Sherlock grits his teeth and exhales.

He joins Victor in the shower and focuses on the water, the soap, Victor's damp eyelashes clumping in the steam.

 

Things begin to unravel at the seams.

Victor buys newspapers in the mornings, tucked under his arm, and reads the art crimes on the floor, while Sherlock holds a test tube to the light to watch the swirling precipitate.

"Where do you think he went though? My father?"

"Hmm?"

"He usually lies low after some large exchanges, but only for a couple of weeks, two at most."

"Oh."

"Maybe they caught him."

"That'd be in the papers."

Victor clucks his tongue. "You're right. Where do you think he went?"

"Maybe he's dead."

There's a pause and Sherlock looks away cautiously from his timer to find Victor's frown.

"Alright, I get it. You want to work." He gathers his newspapers and clears into their bedroom, and Sherlock notices him knock on the door,superstitious.

He feels bilious and he can't focus so he tosses the entire experiment and joins Victor who is on the bedroom floor bent and propped up elbows over months worth of Art Crimes spread out before him, like he's looking for breadcrumbs.

Breadcrumbs scattered every which way.

It's awful, a horror of an entirely new sort. Victor doesn't move until Sherlock, out of something like panic, pulls him against his chest.

"Don't worry so much", Victor says after a moment, when they're both breathing a little easy. "He'll show up."

 

Obviously, Trevor does not show up.

Sherlock tries to occupy Victor with experiments and the London streets and his violin and sex. It works, to a certain degree, because Victor's enthusiasm extends to anything, he's up for anything.

But after a while he gets distracted with a straying moodiness, like it did in Amsterdam until Sherlock got irritated, sick on the cold tiles from a withdrawal, and said, "It's a good thing he's gone. I don't understand why you're fretting. Do you know he murdered your mother?"

He's getting irritated now, and he's getting irritated at his irritation. He sits over his experiment and glowers. Victor drops a kiss in his hair and moves away. Sherlock can hear him splashing in the bathroom, singing. 

_We will serenade our Louis while life and voice shall last then we'll pass and be forgotten with the rest._

He bustles out the door to get his newspapers and things haven't gotten out of hand yet.

Sherlock has nightmares: feral dogs stalking around him, their eyes glowing.

 

A week later, things get out of hand.

It's a quiet morning, hateful, and Sherlock is sitting by the violin propped up on the wall, smoking and listening to the upstairs neighbor groan, the distant sound of plumbing, a toilet flushing. A draft sweeps in and just as Sherlock pushes up and pulls down the window, the door swings and bangs off the wall.

"They've arrested them", Victor says, brandishing a newspaper."The whole lot of them."

He tosses the newspaper at Sherlock and strides into the bedroom, swearing. Sherlock opens the paper and shakes it out.

"Do you know where my emergency papers are?" Victor yells.

"No." Sherlock says, skimming the article Victor had been reading.

_...Arrests made last night when suspects linked to the art heist from Vienna's Museum of Fine Arts last year attempted to fence artwork worth over four million dollars. Most of the art has been recovered... two suspects linked to the heist are still on the run...believed to go by the alias Vladamir Bleukher..._

Victor emerges from crashing around the bedroom with a bag and dumps the contents on the floor.

They're all papers, passports, wads of cash and a little box of drug paraphernalia. His hair stands on end, as though he's been running his hand through it, and he's sifting hurriedly through the passports, flipping them open, until he finds the one he's looking for and tosses it away. 

Sherlock picks it up, gingerly like it's an incendiary bomb. It's a brilliant fake, a Russian international passport, with Victor looking weirdly solemn. _Vladamir Bleukher_.    

"What are you going to do?" Sherlock asks. 

Victor is going through the money. "If they've got most of them, someone's going to cut a deal to save their arse."

"So what will you do?"

"Find my dad. I'll check all the warehouses. Warn him not to fence anything."

"What? You can't leave."

"I know that's what he'll do, he always goes for cash during a crisis."

"Victor, you can't leave. How will you make it past airport security? "

"England's an island, Sherlock", Victor says. He's throwing the money back in the bag. "There are other ways."

"Victor", Sherlock says, and even he can't believe the distress in his tone. "You can't leave."

Victor straightens to stare at him.

"It won't make a difference," Sherlock says.

"No, he has reach, some important connections. He was always talking about it", Victor says. "Look, you could come with me, but this is dangerous and -"

"It's not that, I don't care if you leave", Sherlock says, before he realizes what it sounds like. "It's not that."

"Then what is it?"

"You won't find him."

"Well I'll have to try, at least." Victor moves with an air of finality, Sherlock moves desperately after him.

"Look don't leave now. I'll call Mycroft."

"I can find him."

"No, Victor. Listen."

"What is it?"

This is stupid. _Stupid_.

"He's dead", Sherlock says.

For a moment Victor doesn't even pause his searching through the crates on his knees. Then he pins a look on Sherlock, and Sherlock can't move.

"Why would you fucking say that?"

"He's dead. It was Yeva, that's what we fought about", Sherlock says in a rush. "Because I confronted her, just to see what she'd say -"

" _What_?"

"I just wanted to see how she'd react. How people react, the immediate reaction is almost always the same -"

" _React_?"

"He's dead, Victor. Yeva buried him behind that Church. In Kharkov. He's dead."

Victor's on his feet, charging like an animal and Sherlock can do nothing but stare, guts in knots and he's still talking, miles a minute about the art and the photograph and his aunt, and it's stupid. It's so stupid. He sounds impassive; he doesn't mean to.

Victor takes him by the collar and flings him across the room.

He falls against the test tube rack with the standing chemicals, and he doesn't have time to think about the ruined experiment before Victor grabs him, breathing hard, and hits him across the jaw, and something else shatters.

"You fucking knew", Victors says, clenched teeth and nose flared. It's a blunt, ugly look on him, the look of his father who he's never resembled before. He hits Sherlock.

"For months, you bastard."

"It was in her things when we were in Chechnya, his wallet." And Victor hits him.

He bites his cheek and swallows blood. His ears roar, and even seconds after the blows have stopped Sherlock doesn’t notice. A door slams somewhere, and Sherlock is crumpled on the floor.

He blinks blood out of his eyes and pulls himself up hanging on to the table. The room spins like a top. He can breathe but with a pinch. He tests his jaw. It hurts.

He staggers to the tiny bathroom and looks with fascination at the blood shining on his split lip. He watches the plume of blood that dilutes in the water and spirals down the drain.

His cheeks are wet and he hiccups. No,they're sobs. With a detached interest, he notes he's sobbing. Monotonously, mechanically.

It passes. He pours himself a cup of cold water and holds it against his too warm cheek.

He walks to the living room and it's strewn with a forlorn jumble of objects, passports and cash. The bedroom door is shut. Sherlock thinks it's quiet, until suddenly it's not, and all he can hear are the high, shuddering sounds coming from inside.

He sits by the violin propped up against the wall and looks at the jagged shards, the smashed glass glinting across the floor like stars.

 Madness, Sherlock thinks. And desolation.

 

Sherlock discovers a broom and a dustpan and he cleans out of restlessness. Then he plucks at his violin. He picks up the drug box off the floor. Inside there's a syringe and a small baggie.

He texts Mycroft.

_Did you hear? -SH._

Mycroft takes his time.

_"Yeva and co. in custody, yes. -MH_

_Need your help. -SH_

For a while, there's nothing.

_"Please. -SH_

He nearly drops his phone when it lights up.

_My dear brother. Of course. -MH_

It makes him laugh an abrupt, high laugh. _My dear brother_ , Victor laughed once. _Fyodor and Mikhail_.

 

He sits on the window sill and smokes a celebratory cigarette, because Mycroft can fix most things that matter. Then he smokes some more. He smokes until the dusty pieces of the sky between the buildings are going pink around the edges. Then Victor opens the door.

His face is blotchy, spots of red high on his cheeks. Sherlock looks at him, gaze steady, until he says, "Please will you come to bed?"

He does.

Victor is quiet. He sits with Sherlock on the bed and touches with his thumb the itching split on his lip, the blooming ink blue around his eyes and jaw. Victor doesn't speak a word.

"You aren't a man until you've had a proper thrashing", Sherlock jokes for Victor, and Victor swallows. His knuckles are bruised.

They sit there until it gets very dark and Victor takes his hand. Sherlock lies them down and kisses him.

They lie together in the dark.

 

 Mycroft comes through, not quite kicking and screaming, but plenty snide.

They gather in a dark office in Whitehall. Mycroft looks pointedly at Sherlock's face and the splotchy skin of Victors hand. He pushes a manila folder towards Victor with the tips of his fingers.

"You've been offered a sound deal. Recover the rest of the art, and gather up the rest of your extensive drug cartel."

"To lock them up?"

"Oh no, of course not. I wish to invite them to dinner."

It hurts to roll his eyes, but Victor manages for him.

"Agree, and all charges are dropped."

Victor nods.

"I'll hand you over to Interpol and their many savory tracking methods then."

"Thanks", Victor says. "Really."

Mycroft pulls a positively unpleasant face. "Well, since you've so graciously made my brother a suspect in an art heist, it's the least I can do."

Victor shifts, defensive. "Sherlock came of his own violation. "

"Of course he did", Mycroft says. "Further proof of his idiocy."

"Oh please don't be boring Mycroft", Sherlock says. "You're embarrassing me."

He takes Victor's elbow, but Victor doesn't move.

"I love Sherlock", he says. "Very much."

Sherlock clucks his tongue, _what are you doing,_ and Mycroft says, "I'm sure. After all, nothing says I love you better than a black eye."

"Mycroft, shut up",Sherlock says. "I'm a man now."

Mycroft raises his eyebrows, _oh really now_ , but Victor refuses to move.

"You think you're so superior, and maybe you are Mycroft. But you do fail, and you fail terribly. "

"Is that so? And how do you suppose?"

"You can't even tell your own damn brother how much love him."

There's a dreadful silence.

 

 Victor travels with a small case, his parents, frame and wallet, safely packed. He holds Sherlock's hand like he's scared.

They both know it's really Sherlock whose scared.

"It's alright", Victor says. He says, "You remember that day I met you? With your sprained foot and teeth chattering. Look how we've grown, eh? From Judy's little pub to Paris. Granted we slept on the streets but", Victor shrugs. "We cased the Louvre. You got a violin. I fell in love with you."

"You were always in love with me", Sherlock deadpans, and Victor barks a laugh.

"You don't miss much. But it was over and over again, you know? By the Moskva river you making all those deductions when all I wanted was some fucking food. And in Vienna when you called the museum's blueprint 'nonsensical' and tore it up and we had nothing to go on."

"It was fun."

"We got caught."

"Byproduct." Sherlock shrugs. 

Victor kisses him. "I loved you from the moment you jumped off that seven feet high gate with that destructive look on your face. And then I kept loving you. Do you know what I mean?"

He does. "I do. It's a dangerous chemical defect."

"Well, safety is boring,"  Victor quotes him.

"I love you."

"I know."

"I do care if you leave."

"I wish I didn't have to."

Sherlock kisses him for a long moment, memorizing his breath, the thump of his blood, the turpentine smell that lingers around him. His eyes, honey shot and large and wet, eyelashes clumping. The little crescent mark on his lip, leftovers of a life they used to have.

He's so beautiful.

"We are little black sheep gone astray", Victor says.

"I'll find you."

"Please do." Victor says. "You can do anything, you know. With that brain of yours. If things are all over the place, it's fine. Chaos is good. Keeps things interesting."

"Mycroft will keel over if you tell him that."

"You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star."

"Definitely don't tell him that."

"I won't, but maybe you should. Probably. All we can do is not do too much damage."

Weather the storm.

"Stay alive, work hard", Victor says.

"I won't be kind."

"No? It can get you things, you know,"

There's a voice around them, telling them something. Sherlock swallows and clenches his teeth.

Victor kisses his face. "Don't worry. You'll find me", he says, and he goes.

He watches Victor's back until he slips among a throng of people and luggage. There are straggly queues, squeaking wheels, people bumping past him and he imagines Victor in his seat, leaning against his armrest to smile at the air hostess. Or reaching over his headrest to tickle a child. Or talking loudly at his neighbor about Danish Seine and trawl nets, or mezzotints in the 17th century, or maybe even him. 

Someone crashes into his shoulder. He ignores the muttered _sorry,_ and tries to breathe. 

 

He staggers home,which is Victor's ratty little flat, and strangely he remembers the kind faced, smiling Bianca the waitress at the café he ate at so long ago. He has a strange urge to see her again, and then it passes.

There's an instant of breezy rain. The streetlights blur and the cars careen. He holds together the debris in this chest and slips into a shadow to dodge the camera that's following him.

His phone buzzes against his thigh. _Lunch tomorrow. We'll talk. -MH._

 _Fine,_ he texts back, and dodges a car.

Later, in Victor's sheets, he remembers the wide, gusty sky when the clouds parted like rags and the moon came up, hung low and pregnant and gleaming, powdering the sky in silver. He remembers the dark, star-encrusted, and all around him the cars honked in a singular, atonal symphony.

The streetlight near the building came to life, the light bouncing off the sharp edge of a broken window. _Spark of beauty_ , Sherlock thinks.

In the morning the sooty fingers of fogs will twine through the air and across the sky.  _Unreal city._

His stomach hurts. He doesn't sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> References to T.S Eliot, the wasteland and some other works, Nietzsche. Einstein and Picasso (appropriated). There are lines from the whiffenpoof song. I borrowed a line from Neil Gaiman. :)


End file.
